Email marketing is a popular digital marketing tactic used by many businesses. With such a high ROI, email marketing can be a worthy investment. However, there is a lot to consider if you want to be successful in your efforts. Our guide covers all the essential tips and tricks for how to do email marketing right.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing tactic that involves using emails to promote a business, products or services. It can also be used to build customer relationships and loyalty. As such, this makes it one of the most popular digital marketing tactics available.
To be successful in email marketing, you need to create and maintain a database of up-to-date customer info, including their email addresses. That way, you can connect with your potential customers and ensure you are gaining the best results.
Email marketing is often considered a low-cost but high-impact tool. This means you can achieve outcomes, such as higher customer engagement or increased sales, without spending as much as other tactics, such as search engine marketing.
Research data from McKinsey also highlights that email marketing is a much more effective method to acquire customers compared to social media.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
There are many benefits your business can gain from a successful email marketing strategy, including:
- Help build relationships with customers
- Helps drive traffic to your site, blog, social media, or any other asset
- Easily segment and target users depending on their demographics
- Allows direct communication with your customers
- Offers much more message and audience control
- Deliver personalised and targeted content to your customers
- Measurable success with higher ROI
However, with fierce competition and spam software becoming tougher, it can be difficult to make email marketing work. Fortunately, there are some essential tips and tricks for how to do email marketing right so you can still benefit.
How to do email marketing right
To be successful in your email marketing endeavours, you need a successful email marketing strategy. Following these tips and tricks can help you achieve the most success from your efforts.
Create a clear goal
Before you even begin to choose an email marketing tool or manage an email list, you need to create clear goals of what you to achieve with your efforts. Do you want to boost sales, increase engagement, or educate users?
Your goals will not only give you a method of determining success but also drive your email campaigns and to who you send your emails. The goals you set must be measurable, achievable and linked to your business needs.
Define your audience
It’s also important that you clearly define your target audience before starting your email marketing efforts. Otherwise, the emails you create may be missing the mark. Creating buyer personas is the perfect way to define your audience.
This will provide you with enough information on your audience to know what content appeals to them. This also allows you to effectively segment your audience so that you can deliver the most relevant and appealing content to the most suitable customers.
An example by SuperOffice showcases how successful clearly defining and segmenting your audience can be. A non-segmented email campaign achieved a 42% open rate with only a 4.5% click-through rate (CTR). A segmented email campaign achieved a 94% open rate and a 37% CTR.
Some of the most popular ways to segment your audience is by:
- Demographics
- Behavioural data
- Stage of the buyer’s journey
- Location
- Customer type
- Email activity
- Customer personas
Choose an email marketing tool
Once you have decided on your goals and what you want to achieve, you need to pick an email marketing tool. This is a specialised tool that helps you create, test, optimise, send, and report on email campaigns.
Given the wide range of options on the market, it can be difficult to decide which works best for your business and goals. Some examples include Mailchimp, HubSpot, Omnisend, GetResponse, and Moosend.
Different tools will have different features, functionality, and pricing. If you’re a small business just starting, Moosend and GetResponse are ideal options to begin with. The lower price point, combined with its easy-to-use interface, make them ideal options for just starting.
Build and maintain a high-quality email database
For your email marketing efforts to be successful, you need to ensure that you have a quality email database in place. This includes encouraging users to join your mailing list while removing old and outdated contacts.
If you don’t already have an email list or it’s limited in size, it’s a good idea to add a sign-up form to your website that allows users to quickly sign up to your mailing list. Something that works well here is adding an incentive, such as exclusive content or discounts.
The important thing to remember is that you need to have consent from a user before you start sending them emails. Not only is this important for data compliance, but many email tools make it an essential term when using their platform. Buying paid lists is an absolute no!
Once you set up this database, you need to keep your data clean. That means removing any users with old and outdated information. This typically involves those where emails bounced, invalid emails, or inactive users that haven’t opened your emails.
By regularly reviewing your database, you improve the effectiveness of your campaigns, boost delivery rates, and help prevent your emails from landing in the junk folder. Most email marketing tools will allow you to keep and manage a database on the platform.
Data compliance
One of the biggest factors you need to be aware of when using email marketing is ensuring compliance with relevant data regulations and legislation. This includes GDPR in Europe and CAN-SPAM in the US.
As per these legislations, you must not buy email lists and you must have consent to send people emails. Having a double opt-in can safeguard you. This is where a user signs up for email marketing, and then confirms the registration by clicking a link sent via email.
Only once a user has completed the double opt-in can you add them to your email list and start sending them emails.
You also need to make it easy for users to unsubscribe from your mailing list if they wish. Including a link in the footer of every email should suffice.
The different email types
When it comes to creating emails, there are many different types to choose from. The type you choose will depend on your purpose and desire for each email. Here’s an overview of each of the different email types:
Welcome emails
The email you send to a customer when they sign up for your mailing list. This first information will typically encourage a customer to learn more about your offering as a way to introduce customers. Sometimes, they may include a trial of other incentives.
Newsletter emails
One of the most popular email types, newsletters are used to promote new products or services, information, or content that appeals to your customers. These emails will include a call-to-action to encourage the user to act, such as checking out a new product.
Lead nurturing emails
Lead nurturing emails try to encourage a specific audience to convert by sending a series of emails. The audience group you send the emails will have an interest in your products or services, and so you build interest by sending additional information or promotional offers.
Confirmation emails
These are emails sent to confirm someone has signed up for emails from you, filled in a form, or purchased a product. As such, it will include relevant information relevant to the action the user performed. It also indicates they are now on the email list to receive further emails.
Promotional emails
Generic emails that contain some form of promotional offer or incentive that is sent to a large audience. These emails are generally used to maintain brand awareness and tease potential products or services. These can also be seasonal themed, such as Christmas or Valentine’s.
Mobile friendly emails
Just like websites now need to be mobile-friendly, so do your emails. Given that between 50-60% of all emails are opened on a mobile device, you need to ensure you create mobile-friendly emails that function and display just as well on smartphones.
Sending out an email not optimised for mobile is a big turn off for many customers. As a result, your engagement, CTR and unsubscribe rate will increase. While good email tools will let you optimise emails for mobile, it’s important to remember that you:
- Keep your copy concise with a good balance of visual content
- Use bullet points or numbered lists where possible
- Direct users to a relevant page or blog if necessary
- Use direct and concise subject lines and preview text
- Make your CTA’s big and standout so it’s easy to click
- Use a responsive email design that optimises for every screen size
Schedule
One of the biggest factors that can impact your email campaign success is schedule. While your subject line plays a strong role in this, when you send your emails is just as important. A good schedule will ensure the optimum day, time, and frequency to send emails.
This will depend on whether you are targeting business customers to consumers. According to research from Optinmonster, this is the best time to consider sending emails:
- B2B customers – during working hours between Tuesday and Thursday. Mid-morning between 9-11 am has the best open and click volume.
- B2C customers – Tuesdays and Thursdays, either late afternoon or evening between 4 and 7 pm.
Another interesting point to note is that emails sent at the start of the month can generate higher sales, according to Omnisend. It’s important to note that the optimum time and day can be different depending on the industry.
You also need to be careful of how frequently you send emails. Too many will cause your unsubscribe rate to rocket. Not sending enough emails and you risk disengaging your audience. Finding the right cadence is crucial for success.
To begin with, try to keep your emails to twice a month. This makes it more manageable for you and prevents alienating your audience. If you find your data is improving, consider increasing this to weekly.
Once you’ve decided on this schedule, make sure you let customers know in their welcome email. That way, they know how often they can expect to hear from you.
Monitor your results
Any successful business strategy or marketing effort success is always determined by the results you achieve. The same is true for email marketing. To determine the success of your campaigns and whether you achieved your goals, you need to measure your results.
While the results you track and monitor will differ depending on your goals, the most important data you want to follow are open rate, clickthrough rate, and conversation rate. This data can be monitored from the moment you click send.
You can find all the essential data and results necessary to determine success using your email marketing tool. You can determine your success by setting key performance indicators (KPIs), which is a quantifiable measure of performance for a specific objective.
Some of the most important results and KPIs you should pay attention to are:
- Unique opens – the number of unique visitors that opened the email.
- Bounce rate – the percentage of unsuccessfully delivered emails.
- Unopened emails – the number of unopened emails
- Open rate – the percentage of all recipients that opened the email
- CTR – the percentage of people who clicked a call-to-action
- Unsubscribe rate – the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your list
- Spam complaints – the number of people who reported your email as spam
- Shares – the number of email forwards or social shares
Email marketing can be an effective method to deliver results for your business. Ensuring you develop an effective strategy that considers your customers, you’re onto a winner! Along with the tips and tricks above, remember to create quality content that appeals to your customers, use personalisation, test your emails, and utilise automation. This puts you in a strong position to gain the most benefits and rewards from your email marketing efforts.